On top of that, "regulation count" is not a natural category, since one regulation can specify an arbitrary number of things. If you replace A) No smoking and B) no littering with C) No smoking or littering, have you changed anything substantive? You have not.
Regulation complexity, of course, is a natural category, but it's hard to measure before the fact and doesn't lend itself to easily-applied "follow for a guaranteed reduction" rules.
I otherwise agree that the measure is too simple.
Washington D.C. may be where regulators work (though some of that is outside the District), but regulators are a very small share of the population. The vote in D.C. has little to do with regulators (it has a lot more to do with race, but even saying it was solely about that would be oversimplifying.)
The perception is that all these "horrible" duplications and inefficiencies exist.
The reality is that the duplications are actually slightly different business cases that are are difficult or impossible to generalize (it was easier to copy/mutate) and that seemingly irrelevant code has potentially far reaching and damaging consequences (oh, that was important?)
The essential problem is that we look at these individual lines of code instead of realizing that they grew as part of a dynamic system.
Refactoring code isn't a good analogy.
Try refactoring DNA.
It becomes quite tragic (or hilarious) when teams try to simplify such systems and instead end up breaking lots of business process that was ugly, but worked.
DNA/evolution is orders of magnitude more messy than that, but it gets things done more safely and efficiently than some refactoring efforts I've seen.
"Read My Lips: no new APIs!"
Check who the Trump campaign says is going to be leading the switchover of the EPA. I think I know where most of the slashed regulations are going to come from.
[1] https://twitter.com/harlanyu/status/165184504527462400/photo...
Of course you provide no reason at all except an unsupported assumption to believe that the size of the completely wrong thing that you cite is an indicator of unnecessary complexity, and the fact that you cite the completely wrong thing is a pretty good sign that you have zero knowledge of the domain from which to form a judgement.
You can beat that moneyed system if you happen to be an eccentric billionaire, who happens to have been a household name for decades, who will say anything, racist, misogynistic, hateful, lies and false promises, to get the exposure to get elected despite not paying for it.
Just about anything else and you need money to get exposure, get on television, get yourself in the spotlight. He just didn't happen to have needed money to get exposure, but that's an exception, in exceptional circumstances, and limits potential candidates to those with exceptional media/wealth backgrounds. That's not a model that makes sense to sustain.
And there is a reason for that: "Hillary Clinton was the candidate of the military industrial complex and international finance capital."[1]
[0] https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16 [1] http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/09/the-rejection-of-wall...
Promising to never accept special interest money, only to go on to actively seek out and take it a mere months later, proves that it's necessary to win in an election.
So in my opinion he hasn't demonstrated anything useful.
But he had big money! :)
As for Congress, we also already have a good fix, we just never got around to passing it. Congressional politics are full of money because the districts are too large, on average. The districts are too large because in the 50 states, with 320 million people, we have only 435 voting members in the House of Representatives.
The solution is more Representatives and smaller districts; when you don't have to run a campaign in multiple expensive markets across a broad area, you don't need as much money (and can get to know your constituents better).
And it turns out... there's a constitutional amendment for that.
Way back in 1789 when Congress met for the first time after the Constitution went into effect, they submitted twelve amendments to the states. Ten of them were ratified quickly and became what we know as the Bill of Rights. The other two were not ratified by enough states, and were mostly forgotten.
Today, it's common for Congress to put a time limit on an amendment, saying it has to be ratified within X years or it's dead. But back then they didn't do that. So in 1992 a random university student discovered one of the two "forgotten" amendments and that it was still legislatively "live" -- it would take effect if enough states ratified them. He campaigned hard and got the amendment (which says any increase in salary for members of Congress doesn't take effect until after the next House election) ratified, as the 27th amendment.
The other one is still sitting out there, and would become part of the Constitution if enough states (currently, 27) would ratify it. And it changes the formula for how many Representatives there are, and how they're apportioned. The original text of the Constitution set a cap on the size of the House of Representatives, at one Representative per 30,000 people. The apportionment amendment would raise that to 1 per 50,000, and the version passed by the Senate would require increasing the number of Representatives as the population of the US grows.
So if you want real change in Congress, campaign to get the House of Representatives enlarged. There's even already an amendment available to help you, if you can get it ratified.
Sounds like a good thing then to filter out non-universally good ideas and a great measure to make it harder to buy politicians. Gov needs to do less, not more.
A minor correction to this fascinating story: according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_th...), Gregory Watson, a UT Austin student, discovered it in 1982. The significance of the year 1992 (in this connection) is that that's when it actually became part of the Constitution.
He's actively seeking suggestions on his transition site.
Share your ideas.
Which is to say if, after electing someone to office, we immediately 1) forgot we voted for them, and 2) became completely unaware of their continuing existence and actions in office only then would elections be truly a sufficient substitute for term limits. Otherwise, given the choice, enough votes will be cast to keep the incumbent in office just because he/she is familiar. The thinking seems to go something like: well, that's the name I recognize, and hey, the world hasn't come to an end in the past few years, so... why not. Let's just keep 'em. Versus this other person who might do all kinds of things I can't foresee and may not like.
I can see arguments for term limits, particularly in positions where the composition of the electorate means the other major party isn't likely to seriously challenge the governing party's preferred candidate (usually the incumbent) which makes their position very safe indeed.
But anti-corruption isn't one of them. Arguably, from a point of view of anti-corruption, the incumbent needs the special interests a lot less than the new challengers...
The challenge of term limits is that they hurt effective politicans the most, so it's always got to be a balancing act.
And his program is not only term-limits. mostly going after the criminals and clean up the mess. They should be worried, and are already crying.
Should be doable even with the press witchhunting him and later with the antiliberal nonsense he will come up to please his voter base.
I am of the opinion that politicians corrupted themselves by selling their ability to shape the laws that govern the country and decide who is punished and who is rewarded.
We must elect trustworthy politicians, we must make it harder for big money to interfere, and we must have faith in our government. It's hard for me to say right now, given our current president-elect, but it's true. There truly is no good alternative to democracy.
"Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." -- Speech in the House of Commons (11 November 1947)
Yes.
What kind of system is that?
Self-government[1] and/or a stateless society[2].
There are no examples of 350 million people being governed WITHOUT a government, and for good reasons.
There never is, until the first time. If nobody tried to do things that haven't been done before, there would be no progress.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." ~~ George Bernard Shaw
I'm sorry, but that sounds like the kind of thing an edy 18 year old would say.
Please don't do that, this is HN, not Reddit.
Please don't do that. There's no need to smear other sites. Ending the sentence at "Please don't do that." should suffice.
As much as we'd like to believe otherwise, virtually ALL progress is incremental. Technological AND societal.
I'm sorry, why should I feel obligated to give you an example? Like I already said once, there are no examples of something that hasn't been done... yet. So your repeated request for something that isn't required strikes me as kinda pointless.
I certainly think anarchy could work, if the underlying technological stuffs were the enforcers of equality.
*The book is called "Distress", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distress_(novel)
Case in point: A couple of weeks ago, a jury acquitted the Bundys after they'd occupied a federal building and used threat of lethal force to keep federal authorities from evicting them. If you'll pardon my snark, this is what happens when you turn jurisprudence over to a handful of rednecks.
Along very similar lines, modern-day politicians make decisions affecting (in some cases) millions of lives and trillions of Dollars. The issues they decide on are complex, and ideally we'd want lawmakers to really work at their "trade:" To deeply study the issues and consult competent experts. Our current crop of professional career politicians, some of whom are evolution and warming deniers heading up education and environmental/energy committees are spectacularly failing to live up to this expectation, and there's no good reason to believe a selection of people randomly chosen from the population would do better, on average.
Everything I've seen so far suggests Trump isn't what blue-collar voters ordered for.